Cherry Bomb

If the slide into bourgeois bohemian middle age is signaled by weekly farmer’s market visits and excessive zeal for new kitchen gadgets, I am the avalanche. Unable to consume one more raw cherry and compelled to make a cobbler to address our bounty, I found myself without a cherry pitter. A quick trip to Sur La Table later, I was redecorating my kitchen in fuchsia splotches. I chose the OXO version, which while handsome, I can only partially recommend on account of the splattering and the fact that my husband nearly broke a tooth on the many pits I failed to remove.

On a side note, is totally disturbing to me that the employees at our neighborhood Sur La Table know me by name, thanks in part to our wedding registry last year. Consumer capitalism gets you good when you get hitched—I’m still receiving an unsolicited, unwelcome copy of Brides magazine each month. Little do the power that be know, I was the most disappointing participant in the wedding industrial complex of all time. This county courthouse bride didn’t even manage register for a cherry pitter!

You probably already have a go-to cobbler recipe, but I thought I’d tap out mine. At some point my recipe was essentially a Joy of Cooking/Betty Crocker hybrid, one I cobbled together, wink wink. But it’s enough my own now that the specifics may be worthwhile if you find yourself with an excess of cherries, sweet or sour.

Cherry Cobbler

Filling:

4 cups of pitted fresh cherries (I used sweet, but you could use sour and up the sugar)

½ cup sugar

1 tablespoons cornstarch

1 teaspoon lime zest

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Biscuit:

4.5 tablespoons room temperature unsalted butter

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour

3 teaspoons sugar

2-½ teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

¾ cup milk

Heat oven to 375º.

Pit those damn cherries. Bemoan the fact that your kitchen now looks like a shocking pink Pollack painting. Realize that you don’t have a lime. Steal a lime from your neighbor’s lime tree down the street. Mix cherries with 1/2 cup sugar, cornstarch, lime zest, and vanilla extract. Pour into ungreased baking dish that will fit the whole damn things with a few inches to spare for biscuit.